India’s questionable choices of icons

It was only in 1990
that one of twentieth century India’s finest minds, principal author of its
constitution and campaigner against caste oppression, B.R. Ambedkar, was
conferred this honour, 34 years after his death.

Bharat Ratna (literally
Gem or Jewel of India), is the country’s highest civilian honour. It was
instituted in 1954 and thus far 43 people have been conferred the award, in
many cases decades after their death. Most recipients in the first three
decades were politicians who had taken part in the struggle for freedom from
British rule and led the country or parts of it later. Scientists, social
workers and musicians have figured on the list too. Crucially, upper-caste Hindus
have predominated.

The latest
two to be conferred the title, in mid-November, are cricket player Sachin
Tendulkar and scientist C.N.R. Rao. The cricketer has a mass following in India
and among the Indian diaspora and is known to cricket fans in many former
British colonies where the game is played. The latter’s is a name few Indians
outside of regular English-language-newspaper-reading circles will have heard
of and is an unknown quantity abroad excepting among some scientific circles.

These are questionable
choices. The honour conferred on the cricketer is problematic on several
levels. Cricket is no doubt popular in much of South Asia. In the first decades
after independence, India and Pakistan were the only two countries on the
subcontinent where the game was popular, but soon Sri Lanka and Bangladesh
emerged on the scene. The game or a pared down version thereof is certainly
played even in rural areas. Lines drawn on a wall or a slab of stone in lieu of
wickets, a plank of wood or crude bat and a worn out tennis ball are all that
are needed for millions of kids to get playing.

However, a formal
game of cricket needs massive resources. Vast, well-tended grounds, pads,
helmets, bats, leather-balls, wickets and various other paraphernalia are
needed. Only the urban middle class can afford to either raise the funds
required or gain access to schools, clubs and other institutions that offer
such resources. The class and caste composition of the players can therefore be
imagined.

At the rural or slum
level, even the people of oppressed castes and communities play the no-frills
version of the game, mostly in the evenings and during holidays. But the
leather-ball-pad-helmet version is accessible almost exclusively to members of
the dominant castes in urban areas. The formal version of cricket is one of the
most undemocratic and elitist of games.

Moreover, cricket’s
dominance has been at the expense of other sports. In most cricket-playing
countries outside South Asia, cricket is far from being the dominant game.
Rugby, football (soccer) and others take primacy. Anyone can kick a football
anywhere: legends have been born in impoverished parts of Latin America and
Africa and people of all classes, tribes and races have had an almost equal
chance of partaking in the sport and benefiting from it, not only financially.

Obsession with
cricket in India has choked off hockey, in which India once excelled. Moreover,
South Asia has many indigenous games that require not a cent, such as wrestling
and kabaddi: in the latter, lines are drawn across a small rectangular field,
roughly the size of a volleyball court and a raider goes in to touch, during
the course of a single breath (demonstrated through continuous utterance of the
word “kabaddi”), as many of the opposing team as he or she can while risking
getting captured; the team left with its members standing is declared
winner. All these games have been in the doldrums.

Cricket has spawned
massive corruption, with international ramifications. Bookmakers’ networks have
sought to fix matches, thereby testing the integrity of cricketers everywhere.
There is a long and growing list of cricketers banned for match-fixing. They
include the late South African captain Hansie Cronje. The hugely affluent Board
of Control for Cricket in India is a law unto itself, unanswerable to any
entity.

Apart from the
unsuitability of a member of this corrupt cabal for a national honour, the
choice of Tendulkar is problematic for other reasons. His utility to his team has
been questioned. He has been accused of playing not to ensure his team won
but merely to build his profile in the cricket record books. He hung around for
years after many of his generation retired and after people tired of asking
when he would go.

Moreover, Tendulkar
has not excelled in any walk of life other than cricket and in using his
cricket star status to feature in advertisements selling consumer products. He
has not taken a stand against the ills plaguing Indian society, not opposed a
Hitler-admiring Hindu chauvinist politician, the late Bal Thackeray who rose to
prominence by terrorising Indians from outside his native Maharashtra state as
well as Muslims. Rather, he has enriched himself enormously, stooping so far as
to using his access to bureaucrats and politicians in order to escape paying
customs duties on a Ferrari gifted to him and then selling it on at a premium.

C.N.R. Rao’s utility
to India would appear to be less controversial. That Rao was conferred the
Bharat Ratna award on the very day Tendulkar retired from first class cricket
and that invariably Indian newspapers gave pride of place to the cricketer in
their headlines, indicates that the government added him as an afterthought, in
order to perhaps gain some credibility for its decision to honour the sports
star. Rao is said to be an authority in solid state chemistry and is credited
with building institutions. However, it is unlikely that he would have gained even
the small amount of exposure he gets in the English-language media in India but
for a realisation among journalists, bureaucrats and politicians in developing
countries in the mid-1970s that much of the news about their countries was
negative and that there needed to be greater focus on the positive – an idea
expressed in the term “development journalism”.

C.N.R. Rao. Wikimedia/Biswarup Ganguly. Some rights reserved.

Needless to say, for
every honest and professional attempt at pursuing “development journalism”,
there were innumerable examples of not only self-serving propaganda dished out
by dictatorial regimes but lazy, cynical and pro-government writing even in the
quasi-democratic developing countries – positive plugs bought by public sector
institutions garnered through plying ill-paid journalists with junkets, food,
liquor and other inducements.

This is not to
insinuate that Indian scientists plunged to such depths but the culture that
spawned cynical, lazy and pro-public sector institutions, helped by public
relations budgets that provided for generous hospitality, elicited a great deal
of publicity for establishments, especially those that were associated with the
nuclear, missile and other military-related sciences and technology but also some
others. Rao has been good at projecting himself through the media. Incidentally,
another Bharat Ratna, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam,
is an aeronautical engineer and has been, despite his Muslim name, a darling of
the Brahminical establishment, labelled “missile man” for having helped foster
India’s arms industry and thereby affirming Hindu chauvinist manhood, so to speak.
He was conferred the honour in 1997 and subsequently made the Indian republic’s
president, or ceremonial head of state from 2002 to 2007.

At least one of the
hundreds of scientific papers co-authored by Rao has attracted accusations
of plagiarism. During a press
conference Rao held after the Indian government’s announcement of the
award, he called politicians “idiots” for not having funded scientific research
to the extent he would have liked. This takes the sheen off his “gem” status,
such as it is.

Both Tendulkar and
Rao are Brahmins, as indeed are a large number of previous awardees. In fact,
the first several, starting with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari in 1954 were
Brahmins. Some Brahmins and members of other dominant castes like to think they
have a genetic superiority. The truth is that for millennia, they have kept
members of the oppressed castes out of education. To this day, in the second
decade of the twenty first century, there are villages and towns in India where
members of the oppressed castes are barred from some schools, some streets and
from drawing water from some wells. It was only in 1990 that one of twentieth
century India’s finest minds, principal author of its constitution and
campaigner against caste oppression, B.R. Ambedkar, was
conferred the honour, 34 years after his death.

During the British
Raj, the colonial masters took advantage of Indian society’s fragmentation
along the lines of caste, religion, region, language and others. A concept of
“martial races” was floated – people of some castes and communities were
recruited in large numbers in the armed forces. Brahmins and others were
recruited as clerks and pen-pushers. After independence in 1947, the dominant
castes privileged tertiary education and neglected primary education. The
result: India has the largest pool of illiterates. Rural areas lack roads,
drinking water, health centres – and schools.

Rao, Tendulkar and other dominant
caste Bharat Ratnas are beneficiaries of this discriminatory system. The groves
of academe have been breeding grounds of discrimination. And over the decades
there have been times when an overwhelming majority of India’s test cricket
side has consisted of Brahmins from Maharashtra and southern India. Understandable
therefore that some people who champion the rights of members of the oppressed
castes should dismiss the announcement of the award to Tendulkar and Rao as another
ugly case of dominant castes choosing their own for their “Brahmin Ratna”.

N. Jayaram is a journalist now based in Bangalore after more than 23 years in East Asia (mainly Hong Kong and Beijing) and 11 years in New Delhi. He was with the Press Trust of India news agency for 15 years and Agence France-Presse for 11 years and is currently engaged in editing and translating for NGOs and academic institutions. He writes Walker Jay's blog.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.